There are cold starts to a season—and then there’s this one from the Seattle Mariners. In their first 13 games, they’ve hit .184, which is brutal, even if their pitching has been carrying a lot of the weight with a franchise-best 2.62 ERA over that same span. Still, the standings don’t care about ERA vibes: Seattle is last with a disappointing 4-9 record.
This week in Texas didn’t help, either. The Mariners got swept, scoring three total runs across three games, and managed just 11 hits. Wednesday ended in a two-hit shutout, and you could practically feel the frustration hanging in the air—like after the final out, when the stadium goes quiet and you hear the faint hum of the lights and someone’s keys in their pocket.
What’s especially gnawing for fans is the bottom-to-middle heart of the order, the so-called 2-3-4-5 zone: Cal Raleigh, Julio Rodriguez, Josh Naylor, and Randy Arozarena. Collectively, they’re 26-for-195 (.133) with one home run. Rodriguez and Naylor are both without an extra-base hit; Arozarena has three doubles at least. Rodriguez has seven hits total, and Naylor has just five to go with a minus-49 WRC+. That’s the kind of stat line that turns “small sample” into a conversation you have every single day.
And, of course, it’s Raleigh who’s getting the early intense scrutiny. Coming off a record-setting 60-home run season, he’s hitting .143 with one home run on seven hits and—this is the part that jumps out—21 strikeouts, the second most in MLB. Misryoum newsroom watched all 55 of Raleigh’s plate appearances through Wednesday’s game, every single one of the 248 pitches he’s seen. The assignment, in Misryoum editorial terms, was right around “this is oddly painful” level—because it wasn’t just one bad at-bat, it was repeat patterns.
Here are some of the moments Misryoum newsroom pulled from Raleigh’s at-bats, and they sort of tell the story. In Game 1, he’s struck out swinging on an 0-2 changeup—no shame there on the outside corner, except the at-bat starts with him taking a first pitch four-seam fastball down the middle for a strike, which is a fun way of saying he’s not simply overmatched by everything. Later in that same game, he’s trailing 5-4 in the eighth, gets ahead 2-0, then swings over a slider from Erik Sabrowski, and ends up striking out looking on a slider outside that he should’ve challenged.
The frustration is louder because there are stretches where the pitches are hard to argue with. Game 2 includes a strikeout at the end of an eight-pitch at-bat against Gavin Williams, where Raleigh fouls off a 3-2 cutter down the middle and then misses a wicked 3-2 cutter that rides in off the plate. Another Game 2 plate appearance has him striking out looking on a curveball way outside, again something he “should have challenged.”
Misryoum newsroom also notes a key context wrinkle: Raleigh and the other big bats played in this year’s World Baseball Classic, and Seattle had a terrible spring training at 11-19. Raleigh himself went 8-for-32 with one home run and 12 strikeouts when he played, then was 0-for-9 in the WBC and got benched for Will Smith for Team USA’s final two games. Yes, in Seattle, Misryoum editorial desk noted, local sports radio reportedly spends a
lot of time on the WBC—roughly two hours a day, though that number is more “vibe” than math.
So what’s actually changing? A key to Raleigh’s monster 2025 was his improvement against left-handed pitching: he hit .281/.351/.681 with 22 home runs in 185 at-bats against lefties after hitting .183 against them in 2024. But in 2026, Misryoum newsroom points to the vertical middle problem—around belt high—where the numbers are sharply different. Where 2025 looked like .290/.333/.695 with 26 HRs in 210 at-bats, 2026 is .105/.261/263 with 1 HR in 19 at-bats. It’s small sample size, sure, but the contact story is also worrying: the contact rate on those pitches dropped from 80.7% in 2025 to 67.6% so far this year. Even in-zone contact has fallen from 78.4% to 65.8%. Misryoum analysis indicates only Jose Caballero has a worse in-zone contact rate among qualified hitters so far, and Rodriguez is 181st.
There’s also the swing-decision angle. Raleigh is similar to Bryce Harper in swing-and-miss tendencies and chase behavior, with lots of walks but plenty of aggression too—just not landing the contact where it matters. Misryoum newsroom recorded that Raleigh is 1-for-7 when putting the first pitch in play this year, compared to a strong 2025 when he hit .427 with 17 home runs in 82 at-bats when he put the first pitch in play. The “first pitch” hunger is still there, it just hasn’t been paying off.
Put it together and the scary part is this: Misryoum newsroom says the Mariners aren’t suffering from bad luck on balls in play. They’ve been bad. Watching the 55 plate appearances felt like an overmatched kid just called up from Single-A. Swing-and-miss against four-seamers and two-seamers is up from 25.2% last season to 50% this year. Rodriguez is missing fastballs more often too—32.8% miss rate compared to 21.6% last year. Hard-hit rates are down as well: Mariners in 2025 were 42.8% hard-hit (4th in MLB) and 2026 is 34.2% (29th in MLB).
Misryoum newsroom also points out that Raleigh’s early 2025 start looked similar—he hit .184 with two home runs through his first 13 games back then—so it’s not like this is unprecedented. The Mariners missed the playoffs by one win in both 2023 and 2024, though, and at some point “too early to panic” becomes “too late to recover.” Maybe it’s just a slow start that passes. Or maybe, actually, this is the kind of hole that’s hard to climb out of once September creeps closer—and the order stays ice-cold.
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